Cheltenham festival opening weekend

There's hardly a festival this year that isn't homing in on the 200th anniversary of Schumann's birth, but Cheltenham's focuses on his mental illness and that of three other composers, Gesualdo, Wolf and Mahler, whose anniversaries also fall in 2010.

Schumann's Violin Sonata in D Minor, Op 121 has the hallmarks of instability, with ruminative, lyrical lines and passionate outbursts. Its ebb and flow eludes many, but not violinist Alina Ibragimova and pianist Cédric Tiberghien. Their Pittville Pump Room recital combined insight and virtuosity. The breathtaking intimacy they brought to the opening of Brahms's G Major Sonata, Op 78 was a potent reminder of the role played by Schumann's wife Clara in these composers' lives.

Festival director Meurig Bowen is bold enough to programme concerts others might consider box-office madness. Pianist Gwilym Simcock's new quintet, Confluence, bridges the world of the classical string quartet with that of jazz. The convergence happened in the music's fabric: harmonies seemed to begin where Ravel and Debussy's jazz dabblings had left off, and there was homage to Debussy and the first two distinctive notes of his string quartet. Understanding with long-term partners the Sacconi Quartet was implicit, and further underlined in the exuberant dancing of Simcock's Fundero.